


new life

by ignitesthestars



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Gen, M/M, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 21:35:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nico kisses Percy. This is the fallout. Alternately, how everyone comes to terms with everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	new life

Nico kisses Percy Jackson exactly once.

It’s not one of those ‘oh you’re asleep/knocked out (more likely), let me take advantage’ kisses. Even he’s not that creepy. No, he makes sure they’re both stone cold sober and conscious when he does it, because if he’s going to torture himself with something he can’t have, he might as well give himself new material to work with. Go big or go home, right? (Nico doesn’t have a home).

So he kisses him. Or, brushes his lips over Percy’s in the middle of some conversation about what to call Camp Halfblood now that it’s a town.  Percy’s actually still talking when he does it, which has the unexpected effect of making it seem like he’s kissing back, and _shit_ , this was a really bad idea.

Nico stumbles back, feeling like he’s been struck by lightning, and not in some cutesy, tingling sort of way. No, this is the burning, searing pain of knowing you’ve survived something you shouldn’t have. Percy’s mouth is still open, frozen in uncertainty; Nico just sort of stares back at him, wide eyed, because there isn’t a plan for what to do after ‘kiss him, just do it, just once’. And to be honest, that hadn’t been much of a plan either.

“What?” Percy says eventually, and he doesn’t sound offended, or disgusted, or horrified. Just…confused, like this is something he couldn’t have seen coming in a million years. And Nico just wants to take him by the shoulders and yell at him, because he’s so fucking g _ood_ , how could he possible think that all of Nico’s animosity was because he _didn’t_ like him?

Instead of that, what comes out is a half-panicked, half-defient ‘you’re so _stupid_ ’ before he slips away into the shadows, because he isn’t the one that Percy would follow into darkness.

* * *

Jason finds him, because of course he does. Nico still hasn’t figured out how he does that, and if he’s honest with himself, he’s not going to try. Because if he knows, he’ll try to circumvent it.

“Don’t,” he growls, as Jason drops out of the sky and lands in front of him. He’s in the Strawberry Fields, figuring that the last place anyone would look for him is somewhere surrounded by new life.

“I haven’t even said anything yet,” Jason protests lightly.

“I really don’t want you to say anything at all.”

“That’s fine. I’ll just sit here.”

And he does exactly that, sitting down next to Nico and leaning back on his hands, turning his face up to the sun. Nico eyes him angrily, half expecting him to start humming or something. Jerk.

“Let me guess,” he snaps after a moment of being totally ignored by the guy who interrupted him. “Percy told Annabeth, who told Piper, who told you?”

Jason shakes his head. “Percy came to me. I mean, he probably told Annabeth as well, for obvious reasons. But I didn’t get it through the grapevine.”

Nico scowls down at his hands, trying to ignore the wave of relief that washes through him. Maybe in the past year or two he’s come more to terms with what – _who_ – he is. But that doesn’t mean he wants the rest of Camp to find out. Even with the Seven, he’s been content to keep them mostly at ‘suspicious, but unsure’.

“He came to you?”

“He knows we’re friends. I guess when he couldn’t find you, he thought I might know where you were.”

“You did,” Nico points out.

“Yeah, but I thought you might want some warning before leaping into that conversation. I mean, if you were ready to have it, you wouldn’t have run away in the first place.”

There’s a certain weight to the words _run away_ that make Nico shift a little, uncomfortably. He wants to protest, but he can’t, because that’s exactly what he did. It’s exactly what he’s always does, and there’s a large part of him that still hopes it’ll work out for him one of these days.

Today is apparently not one of those days.

“I need—” But the words stick in his throat. Because even after all this time, even talking to Jason (who has never judged him, always supported him), actually bringing up his feelings for Percy Jackson is a little bit like slowly wading into lava. Pointless and excruciating and why would you do something like that slowly anyway, why not just throw yourself in head first and get it over with, if you’re going to do it?

“You need to be talking about this with someone not me, man.”

The wording might be a little awkward, but after all this time, Nico knows it’s not rejection. It’s something _encouraging_ , like ‘go talk to Percy, you’ll feel better afterwards’, except wrapped up in a nice noncommittal bow so that Nico can accept it. He can’t decide if it’s more embarrassing that Jason has learnt how to handle him, or that he needed to be handled in the first place.

He grits his teeth, forces the words out anyway. He’ll talk to Percy, he will. He just needs to get something clear to himself, first. “Once it’s out, it’s over.”

Nico doesn’t know how to deal with that. He doesn’t do _moving on_. The truth is, when he’d kissed Percy, he’d hoped for rejection. Something concrete, something that would wound him, something that would slam the door shut on his feelings, but still give him something to hold on to. Even if that something was only pain.

Making a clean break is about a thousand times more terrifying.

Jason claps him on the shoulder. “He’s in his cabin.”

* * *

Annabeth, as it turns out, is also in his cabin. Nico knows this because she’s the one who opens the door. And he’s about two seconds away from slipping (running) away into the shadows again when she lunges forward and grabs his wrist.

He can’t say what her face looks like, because he’s not looking at it, directing his gaze somewhere past her left ear. Annabeth rolls with it, though, because it takes more than a little (or a lot) of awkwardness to prevent this girl from saying what she wants to.

Nico braces himself.

“It’s okay.”

And nearly falls over anyway, because that is definitely not what he’d been prepared for. His eyes stutter over her face after all, and find nothing but compassion in that grey gaze, a little wry twist to her mouth that says she’s sort of annoyed at herself for not figuring it out sooner.

“I mean, it’s Percy,” she continues. “I get it. Obviously. And if I had a nickel for every time someone – anyway.” She breaks off hastily, maybe noting the slow-growing panic in his face, because this is not a conversation he wants to have with Annabeth Chase, ever. “He’s inside. I’m going to out for the rest of the afternoon, so…take your time.”

She lets go of his wrist, yelling something back into the cabin that Nico doesn’t hear, because he’s too busy being surprised that he’s still in possession of all his limbs. And then she’s gone, slipping away almost as subtly as him without the benefit of the shadows at his command.

And Percy Jackson has taken her place in the doorway. He looks like a mess, hair dishevelled, clothes rumpled like he’s been running around in them all afternoon and hasn’t had time to change. Sea-green eyes trail after Annabeth for a brief moment, before zeroing in on him.

Whatever words Nico had planned to say here abruptly dry up in his throat. At the end of the day, he’s just really bad at _talking_. Seventy years in a mindless haze of gaming plus an extra half decade or so of almost totally isolation does that to a person, apparently.

“I’m sorry.”

It takes him a second or two to realise that he hasn’t actually regained the ability to speak. That Percy has just shoved a hand through his hair to rub at his neck, and opened his mouth.

Nico scowls. “Don’t be an idiot.” Not exactly how he wanted to start off this conversation, but he’s as ADHD as the rest of them, and the words are out there now. He hesitates, feeling his shoulders hunching in on themselves, hating how vulnerable the next question makes him feel. “What are you sorry for?”

 _Sorry you’re into dudes, dude. That must suck_. And then Nico could say yeah, it really does, and then turn around and leave, and it’ll be over.

Percy shifts uncomfortably. There’s a sick feeling growing in Nico’s stomach, because this – well, it’s not his one true fear, because he has too many of those to pick just one that’s the worst. But it is _one_ of them, because Percy’s pretty much always been the guy who just shrugs off his weirdness as ‘it’s a Nico thing, you know?’ But this, it’s not just a Nico thing anymore, now it’s a _weird_ thing, now he’s made Percy uncomfortable, now he’s—

“That I didn’t figure it out on my own,” Percy blurts. “I mean, now that I know, it seems really obvious, and I just – there’s no chance that I didn’t put my foot in it somehow, or make things worse for you, and I’m sorry for that. I really, really am.”

Belatedly, Nico remembers Percy telling him about Tartarus. He’d never quite come out and said it, but the undercurrent had been there, the fact that Percy had become excruciatingly aware of his tendency to miss things. Or forget them. Or move on once the trauma had passed for him. At the time Nico had been bitter (he’s still bitter), but he can’t really hold the guy accountable for the things that go past him in the face of everything he’s caught.

Percy, apparently, hasn’t got that memo. Nico sighs, looking away.

“I didn’t want you to know,” he points out.

“Yeah, but—”

Percy might be amazing in about ten thousand different ways, but no one has ever gotten Nico so irritated so easily. “No, I mean that I _really_ didn’t want you to know. Not ‘I didn’t want you to know, but I secretly did want you to know so you could make me feel better about it’. I didn’t want anyone to know. _I_ didn’t want to know.” He rubs a hand over his face. “It was – it was one other thing, you know? Like the universe was telling me I was never going to fit anywhere.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah.”

The silence stretches out, and Nico finally finds it in himself to look up again. If he’s doing this, he might as well do it properly.

Percy’s expression is a riot of conflicting emotions, but the most prominent one is an almost naked desire to say the right thing. Not for his own sake, not because he doesn’t want to be the bad guy here, but for Nico. Something something in his chest unlocks when he sees it, because the entire world knows how shitty Percy is at getting the words right, but he has that tendency to throw his whole being into the things that he feels.

And Percy might be feeling awkward and out of place and like a really crappy friend right now, but the most prominent thing Nico is getting from him is the same thing he got from Jason two years ago, the thing that has _taken_ him these past two years and more to actually accept.

Acceptance.

Percy sighs, his hand flopping down to his side. “I just – wish I could have helped. You’re my friend, you know? I’d want to – be there.”

Nico snorts. “Okay, now try to imagine if Annabeth didn’t have feelings for you, and told you that she wanted to help you get over your c – over—” He scowls, and makes himself force the words out, saying each one carefully. “Get. Over. Your. Crush.”

The expression Percy’s face shifts into can only be described as ‘ _ah_ ’. And now that Nico’s said it, that he’s actually dragged his tongue into the necessary shapes to form the words, it’s like the floodgates have opened, and all the rest spills out.

“You can’t help everyone, Percy. If you’d found out earlier, I wouldn’t have listened to anything you had to say about it. I…” He drops his gaze and then changes his mind, making sure he meets Percy’s, making sure he can face this. “I hated myself too much. Being alone was safer than letting anyone – than not – it was just _easier_. I had to figure out that I was wrong about all of that before I’d listen to anyone else.”

It’s the sort of thing where you don’t realise the truth of what you’re saying until you’ve actually said it, until the words are out and you can’t take them back. And it’s not just a two year journey he’s taken here, or even a six year one. It’s a life time leading up to this point, this moment where he can finally just admit what the fucking problem has been.

Percy just sort of stares at him for a moment, a funny look in his eye. And then he reaches out, no hesitation, and clasps Nico on the shoulder in the same way Jason had, not an hour ago. Unlike Jason, he goes one step further and pulls him into a hug.

“I’m just gonna shut up and do this,” Percy explains. “Because it seems like you’ve got it pretty much sorted out, here.”

For a second, Nico’s entire body is still, frozen. But that second passes, and he melts in inches until finally his arms can move, lifting up to hug Percy back.

Because yeah, he pretty much does.


End file.
